[20] From original letter.
The following editorial notice of the above letter is copied from the Oregon Spectator of September 7, 1848:—
“By reference to the above letter by Lieutenant Rogers to Governor Abernethy, it will be seen that the arms and ammunition attempted to be taken into the upper Indian country by Catholic priests, have been seized by Lieutenant Rogers, and deposited in Fort Lee. Orders had been dispatched to Lieutenant Rogers to seize and detain those munitions. [A mistake of the editor. Lieutenant Rogers seized the ammunition, and wrote for orders.] Much credit is due to Lieutenant Rogers and the little garrison at Fort Lee for the promptness and efficiency with which they acted in the matter.
“We understand that there was no disposition on the part of the officers of the government to destroy or confiscate those munitions, but that they were detained to prevent their transportation into the Indian country under the present juncture of affairs.
“We had intended to have spoken upon the attempt by Catholic priests to transport such a quantity of arms and ammunition into the Indian country at this time, but as those munitions have been seized and are now safe, we abstain from present comment upon the transaction!”
The above notice of the transaction, as given by Lieutenant Rogers, is a fair specimen of the man who occupied the place of an editor at the time this infamous course was being carried on in Oregon by the two parties engaged in supplying the Indians with war materials. No one will suppose for a moment that these priests ever bought or owned the powder and arms; their own private supplies may have been in the cargo, but the ammunition and arms were on the way into the Indian country, under their priestly protection, for the benefit of their masters, the Hudson’s Bay Company, who, as we have repeatedly proved, were acting in concert upon the prejudices and superstitions of the Indians.
Was it a great undertaking for that company to drive a thousand or twelve hundred American settlers from Oregon at that time?
Robert Newell, already known to our readers, says, in speaking of missionaries and settlers, “They could not have remained in the country a week without the consent and aid of that company, nor could the settlers have remained as they did up to 1848.” We are willing to admit Mr. Newell’s position only in part. We know that company’s power and influence in Washington and London; we also know fully what they attempted to do from 1812 to 1821, and only succeeded by a compromise with their opponent. We also know all about their operations and influences in Oregon, and are ready to admit that they had the disposition to destroy the American settlements. We also know the extent of the effort made to establish a claim to the Oregon country by means of their French and Hudson’s Bay half-breeds, and we are fully aware of their effort to procure witnesses to substantiate their monstrous claims for old rotten forts and imaginary improvements. Knowing all this, we deny that that company had the courage, or would have dared to molest a single American citizen or missionary, only as they could influence the Indians by just such means as they used to destroy Smith’s party on the Umpqua, drive Captain Wyeth and the American Fur Company from the country, and destroy Dr. Whitman’s settlement. Any other course would have involved the two countries in a war, and led to an investigation of their proceedings and of their charter.
“That company,” says Mr. Fitzgerald, “have submitted to all manner of insult and indignity, and committed all manner of crime, and they dare not go before any competent tribunal for the redress of any real or supposed injury, or right they claim.”
This brings us to the reason that Mr. Douglas gave in answer to Mr. Ogden, in the presence of Mr. Hinman, “There might be other than sectarian causes” for the Whitman massacre, and here we have the united effort of priests and Hudson’s Bay Company to attribute the massacre to measles and superstition, while we have the positive testimony of Mr. Kimzey and others to show that the whole was determined upon before any sickness was among the Indians. From the testimony of General Palmer, the Donner party, Mr. Hines, and Mr. Ogden, we find but the one effort; which was, to prevent, or diminish as much as was possible, the settlement of the country. And why? To answer this question clearly, we have traced the early history of that monster monopoly in previous chapters, and given their proceedings in countries under their exclusive control. To illustrate more clearly the subject of the previous and present chapters, we will give an article we find in the Oregon Argus of February 9, 1856, eight years after the war. The article is headed:—
“The Catholic Priests and the War—‘A Catholic Citizen’ attended to.
“To the Editor of the Oregon Argus:
“Sir,—For the past month I have noticed several virulent articles in each issue of your paper, all tending to impress upon the minds of your readers the idea that the Catholic priests were the head and front of the present Indian difficulties; and being fearful that your constant harping upon that one subject might render you a monomaniac, I am induced to submit to your Argus eyes a few facts in relation to the conduct of the Catholic priests prior to and during the present war. In your issue of the 8th inst., I find an article based upon the following extract from the official report of Colonel Nesmith:—
“‘With sundry papers discovered in the mission building, was a letter written by the priest, Pandozy, for Kamaiyahkan, head chief of the Yankama tribe, addressed to the officer in command of the troops, a copy of which is communicated with this report. There was also found an account-book kept by this priest Pandozy, which is now in the custody of Major Raines. This book contains daily entries of Pandozy’s transactions with the Indians, and clearly demonstrates the indisputable fact that he has furnished the Indians with large quantities of ammunition, and leaving it a matter of doubt whether gospel or gunpowder was his principal stock in trade. The priest had abandoned the mission, but it gave unmistakable evidence of being cared for, and attended to, during his absence, by some Yankama Indian parishioners.’
“You then proceed with great sang froid to pride yourself upon the correct ‘position’ which you took about a month previous, relative to the above subject, and presuming upon the safe ‘position’ which you thus assumed, you say the priests have in a measure prompted the Indians to the late outbreak! A bold presumption, truly, when we find the puny evidence which you have to back your ‘position.’ You further assert as a fact, ‘that in this, as in the Cayuse war, these priests have been detected in the very act of conveying large quantities of powder in the direction of the camp of the enemy.’ This, sir, is a fact which emanated from your own disordered imagination, as during the Cayuse war no priest was ever detected in any such a position, and you know it; but then, it must be recollected that a little buncombe capital does not come amiss at this time, and if you can make it off of a poor priest by publishing a tissue of groundless falsehoods against him, why even that is ‘grist to your mill.’”
“The foregoing is a portion of a communication which appeared in the Standard of December 13, over the signature of ‘A Catholic Citizen.’ The writer of that article, in endeavoring to blind the eyes of his readers, and his pretending to correct us in reference to certain statements we had made concerning a few things connected with the present Indian war, as also the Cayuse war of 1848, in which the Catholic priests had by their intercourse with the savages created more than a suspicion in the minds of the community that they were culpably implicated in the crimson character of these tragedies, wisely intrenched himself behind a fictitious signature. He has thereby thrown the responsibility of some three columns of pointless verbiage, flimsy sophistry, and Jesuitical falsehoods, upon the shoulders of an irresponsible, intangible, ghostly apparition, probably very recently dismissed from some sepulcher at Rome, or from the carcass of an Irishman just swamped in the bogs of Ireland.
“Seven or eight weeks have now elapsed since we called upon this Roman Catholic citizen to emerge from his hiding-place among the tombstones, and if he was really incarnate, with a body of flesh and bones, such as the rest of us have, to throw off the mask, and not only give us a full view of his corporeal developments, but also to send us a copy of the book by which he cleared Pandozy, and justified himself in issuing, from his sweat-house Vatican, his bull of excommunication against us.
“We have thus far ‘harked’ in vain for a sound ‘from the tombs.’ Like a true Jesuit, that loves darkness rather than light, he not only still persists in keeping his name in the dark, and keeping the ‘book’ we rightfully called for in the dark, but attempts to enshroud the whole subject in total darkness, by making up his own case from such parts of Pandozy’s book as he chooses to have exposed, and then thrusting the whole manuscript into a dark corner of his dark-colored coat, and in order to darken what light we had already shed in upon the dark nest of Jesuits, among the dark-skinned and dark-hearted savages, he most solemnly denies as false the most important of the dark charges we made against them, and then, after ‘darkening counsel’ by a whole column of ‘words without knowledge,’ by which, like the cuttle-fish, he darkens the waters to elude the hand of his pursuer, and then, under cover of all this darkness, he dodges into his dark little sweat-house, and issues his terrible bull consigning us to a very dark place, where the multitudes of dark Jesuits that have gone before us have doubtless made it ‘as dark as a stack of black cats.’ But what makes the case still darker is, that while ‘Catholic Citizen’ refuses to expose his personal outlines to our ‘Argus eyes,’ but intimates that as he is a member of the Catholic Church, and of the Democratic party, if we let off a broadside upon either of these societies, and wound either of their carcasses, the one bloated on the blood of saints, and the other on the juice of corn, we shall of course inflict a material injury upon him, upon the principle that ‘when one of the members suffers, all the members suffer with it;’ we say, that in view of the fact that after ‘Catholic Citizen’ has claimed to be a member of both these organizations, the Corvallis organ of the Sag Nichts and Jesuits has whet the razor of authority, and lopped him off, as a heterodox member, and consigned him to the fires of damnation, because ‘Catholic Citizen’ has intimated that the two bodies were not identical, thus wisely enveloping him in a dark cloud, and translating him far beyond the reach of our guns, makes the case terribly dark indeed.
“‘He (Catholic Citizen) displays the cloven foot of either direct opposition to the Democratic organization, or sore-head-ism and disaffection with that organization.——We can hardly conceive that the author of that communication is a Catholic, or a friend of the Catholic Church.’—Statesman of Dec. 25.
“Thus it will be seen that the editor of the ‘organ’ takes him by the top tuft, and applies the ‘rapin hook’ to his neck as a heretic, and not a genuine Catholic, because of his ‘sore-head-ism and disaffection with the Democratic organization,’ thus unequivocally asserting that the church and the clique are identical, or so closely identified that in placing himself in opposition to the one, he proves that he is not a friend of the other. Now whether the action of the organ has been from a malicious desire to ‘bury him out of our sight’ as an ‘unfruitful branch’ of the Catholic and Democratic trunk, or whether he intended in mercy to wrap him up in his Nessean shirt, and hide him from our view by denying to him the only earthly position he assumed, it matters not particularly to us. We shall probably teach him, or his ghost, in due time, a lesson which we long since whipped into the tough and slimy hide of the biped who controls the Statesman, and which he and his ilk would do well to read in the welts that checker his back, before they make their onslaughts upon us, viz., whenever we state a thing to be true, you may rest assured that it is so, and by calling it in question, you may be sure you will provoke the proof. We are not of that class of lying editors who make false charges which they are not able to sustain, and we have never yet vouched for the truth of a statement, and been afterward compelled to back out of it. Whenever we make a mistake, on account of bad information, we are sure to make the correction as soon as we are apprised of it, whether the statement affects the character or interest of friend or foe, or neither.
“Your vile innuendo, that we wished to make a little buncombe capital off a poor sniveling priest, is readily excused, knowing as we do your impressions from associating with political comrades who neither yield to nor expect justice or decency from their political opponents; and presuming also that the moment you stepped your foot upon American soil, with your little budget of Irish rags, some demagogue put a loco-foco hook into your nose, and led you off to the political pound to learn your catechism, so fast that the remaining half of the nether extremity of your old swallow-fork made a right angle with your stalwart frame. We know very well what sort of lessons you have learned out of that catechism; how you have been duped to believe that the principles of Jefferson and other old sainted Democrats were still cherished by the designing demagogues who have taken you in tow; how we who oppose this office-hunting party are ‘down upon Catholics and foreigners’ simply because they are such; and how you had only to put in the ‘clane dimocratthic ticket’ to insure yourself great and glorious privileges. Under this sort of training, it is not surprising to us that you not only expect us to persecute you to the full extent that a priest is sworn to ‘persecute’ heretics, but that you are constantly in fear that the ‘Noo Nothins’ will soon be ladling soup from a huge kettle that contains your quarters boiled up with Irish potatoes.
“We were not led to make the remarks we did in reference to the priests because they were Papists, but because we had reason to believe they were traitors to our government, and were identified with the savages in the present war. If Methodist, Presbyterian, or any other Protestant clergymen had rendered themselves equally obnoxious, we should probably have given our opinion at the time, that they deserved to be brought out of the Indian country, with all their ‘traps,’ to undergo a trial before a jury for their lives.
“But, sir, to one of your falsehoods:—
“‘You further assert as a fact, “that in this, as in the Cayuse war, these priests have been detected in the very act of conveying large quantities of powder in the direction of the camp of the enemy.” This, sir, is a fact which emanated from your own distorted imagination, as during the Cayuse war no priest was ever detected in any such a position, and you know it.’
“Now, sir, we did not suppose that there was a man green enough in all Oregon (excepting, perhaps, the Statesman) to call our statement in question. We happen to be an old Oregonian ourself, and profess to be pretty well posted in reference to many occurrences which will make up the future history of this lovely yet blood-stained land. The proof of our assertion we supposed could be come at by our file of the Spectator. The fact was still vivid in our memory. At the date of this transaction (August 21, 1848), there were three papers printed in the Territory: The Free Press, an 8 by 12 sheet, edited by G. L. Curry, present governor of Oregon, and the Oregon Spectator, a 22 by 32 sheet, edited by A. E. Wait, Esq., both published at Oregon City; besides a semi-monthly pamphlet, printed in the Tualatin Plains, and edited by Rev. J. S. Griffin. Although all of these papers at the time spoke of the transaction referred to, we believe none of them, excepting the Spectator, contained the official correspondence necessary to make out our case. We supposed, and so did many others, that all the old files of the Spectator were long since destroyed, excepting the imperfect one in our office. When ‘A Catholic Citizen’ called our statement in question, we, of course, referred to our ‘file’ for proof, but to our astonishment this particular paper was missing, although the immediate preceding and succeeding numbers were all there, embracing the whole summer of 1848. The missing number was accidentally (?) misplaced, of course, and the proof of that transaction supposed to be beyond our reach. By the kindness of a gentleman we have been furnished with the desired copy from his own file.” (See official note and letter as previously quoted.)
“Now, will ‘A Catholic Citizen’ contend that our statement, in reference to the ‘large quantities of powder,’ is not fully covered by ‘seven or eight hundred pounds of powder, fifteen hundred pounds of lead, and three boxes of guns.’
“A man who can unblushingly utter such a falsehood as he has been guilty of, to create a public sentiment in favor of these priests, is below contempt, and we feel our task of exposing him to be truly humiliating. We have branded this goat with an L——, which will stick to his hide as long as Cain carried his mark; and we now turn him out to browse for a while with B., who wears about a dozen of the same brands, under the pain of which we have sent him off howling. ‘A Catholic Citizen’ may feed on ‘ferrin’ till we get time to clap the same brand to him again, when we shall tie him up to the post and again scorch his wool.”